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Teaching Reading
to Speakers of
Non-Romanized Languages
Scott Alkire
Open
Society Fund – Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
E-mail:
s_alkire@hotmail.com
Teaching
Reading to Speakers of Non-Romanized Languages
© 2004
Scott Alkire
Speakers of non-Romanized languages face special challenges in
learning to read English: a new alphabet,
the left-to-right direction of English text (new to many of these learners),
and, most significantly, the letter-sound correspondences of English, which are
relatively complex among Romanized languages. Fortunately, strategies for
overcoming these challenges are presented in a text by the famous linguist
Leonard Bloomfield and the lexicographer Clarence Barnhart (Bloomfield &
Barnhart, 1961). Though Bloomfield and Barnhart’s text was designed for
teaching native-English-speaking children to read, with minor modifications it
can be used to successfully teach speakers of non-Romanized languages to read
as well.
This
paper discusses Bloomfield and Barnhart’s approach to teaching reading, and
then suggests modifications of their approach for the EFL learner.
Contents:
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Establish a single phonetic value for each letter |
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EFL teachers who have taught in Asia or
the Middle East (to give two examples) know that speakers of non-Romanized
languages face special challenges in learning to read English: a new alphabet, the
left-to-right direction of English text (new to many of these learners), and,
most significantly, the letter-sound correspondences of English, which are
relatively complex among Romanized languages. Fortunately, strategies for
overcoming these challenges are presented in a text by the famous linguist
Leonard Bloomfield and the lexicographer Clarence Barnhart (Bloomfield &
Barnhart, 1961). Though Bloomfield and Barnhart’s text was designed for
teaching native-English-speaking children to read, with minor modifications it
can be used to successfully teach speakers of non-Romanized languages to read
as well.
This paper discusses Bloomfield and Barnhart’s two
preparatory steps to their lessons, their first 36 lessons, and suggests
modifications of the lessons for the EFL learner. The preparatory steps and
first 36 lessons were selected as a point of focus because they address the
initial challenges faced by speakers of non-Romanized languages when learning
to read English, and because Bloomfield (1961, p. 57) calls them “the
foundation” of the learner’s reading.
Bloomfield and Barnhart's first preparatory step is to introduce
learners to the English letters and their alphabetic pronunciation. This step
is straightforward and shouldn't pose many difficulties for learners: most
probably already know how English letters are pronounced through worldwide use
of British/American series of initials which denote organisations, countries,
objects or other phenomena (e.g., BBC, CD, IBM, PC, TV, UK, USA, etc.).
The teacher should present the alphabet in uppercase letters,
left-to-right, across the blackboard and model the pronunciation of each
letter. After the learners have recited the alphabet and have a grasp of each
letter, the teacher should write common series of initials on the board. The
initials will illustrate that the left-to-right order of symbols corresponds to
the sooner-to-later order of spoken sounds in words. The learners should be
encouraged to offer initials of their own. To reinforce the acquisition of the
letters and their sounds, the teacher can present various dictations such as
the alphabet, other initials, or random series of letters.
After the students have
learned the uppercase forms of the alphabet, the teacher should teach the
lowercase forms. Again, various dictations should be given.
The relative ease of
this step can serve as an early confidence builder--important to second
language learning success.
Establish a single phonetic
value for each letter
The second preparatory step is to teach each letter as
having a single phonetic value. These values are different from the
letters’ alphabetic values (with the exception of x). Bloomfield and
Barnhart (1961) recommend the following values, which Bloomfield calls
“regular” (1961, p. 57) and “the best” (1961, p. 40) for the first materials
for reading.
a as in hat
b as in big
c as in cat [1]
d as in dog
e as in pet
f as in fan
g as in get
h as in hen
i as in pin
j as in jet
k as in kid [1]
l as in let
m as in man
n as in net
o as in hot
p as in pen
q as in quit [2]
r as in red
s as in sad
t as in tan
u as in cut
v as in van
w as in wet
x as in exit [2]
y as in yes
z as in zip
The teacher should lead the learners in the
pronunciation of these words to reinforce the acquisition of the phonetic
values they represent. The teacher should also give word dictations to
reinforce the sound-spelling correlations of the words.
First
36 lessons: focusing on vowels
Bloomfield and
Barnhart’s first 36 lessons (“Part I: First Reading”) consist of two- and
three-letter words using the phonetic values given above (save q and x).
Since the vowels a, e, i, o, u are the letters which, later on, will
present the greatest difficulty to learners, Bloomfield and Barnhart divide the
36 lessons into five groups according to them.
Lessons 1-8 a as in hat
Lessons 9-16 i as in pin
Lessons 17-24 u as in cut
Lessons 25-30 e as in pet
Lessons 31-36 o as in hot
Within each of these
five groups, it is possible to form groups by final consonant (e.g., bat,
cat, fat, etc.) or by initial consonant (e.g., bad, bag,
bat, etc.). Bloomfield and Barnhart (1961, p. 41) begin with the former
because “it is easier to watch the first letter than the last, and because
rhyme is familiar to the student.” [3]
Bloomfield and
Barnhart suggest the following for Lesson 1:
The teacher writes
the word
can
on the blackboard and
tells the learners to read off the letters in order: /see/ /aye/ /en/. The
teacher then tells the learners to say can.
The teacher writes
another word with the same vowel and final consonant, but with a different
initial consonant, for instance
Dan
The teacher asks the
learners to read off the letters in order: /dee/ /aye/ /en/. The teacher then
tells the learners to say Dan.
Now the teacher must
work with the learners until they can distinguish between can and Dan--that
is, until the learners can read each correctly when it is shown by itself and
with the other.
After this has been
achieved, the teacher adds two or three more words of the same group, for
example
fan, man, Nan
The drill should continue
until the learners can correctly read any one of the words when the teacher
points to it. Then the words should be shown in various orders, and separately,
until the learners can easily read all of them.
The teacher presents
the other words of the group in the same way as the first five:
pan, ran, tan, an, ban, van
Then, the teacher
presents the words with articles, for example:
a can a fan
a pan a man a van
a tan van a tan fan
And then short
sentences:
Dan ran. Nan ran.
Van ran. A man ran.
Once the “-an” group
of words has been learned, both in isolation and in short sentences, the
teacher proceeds to another final consonant group, e.g., the “-at” group
(Lesson 2), and follows the same procedure as in Lesson 1, except this time at
the end of the lesson he/she presents pairs such as
bat ban, cat can,
fat fan, mat man, Nat Nan, pat pan
These pairs are
important for attuning the learners’ ears to the subtle sound-meaning
correlations of English.
* * *
In this fashion
Bloomfield and Barnhart present their first 36 lessons, the last several of
which consist of complete sentences such as “Dad got on a bus” and “Don had a
nap on a cot” and “A man had a bed in a van.” The lessons avoid orthographic or
phonetic exceptions: none have words with silent letters (e.g., knit, gnat)
or double letters, either in the pronunciation of single sounds (as in add,
bell) or in special values (as in see, too). No lessons have
words with combinations of letters having a special value (as th in thin
or ea in bean). This is essential to Bloomfield’s ideal of getting
learners to a plateau of phonetic understanding of written English from which
all future reading can extend.
Completion of these
lessons is enough to launch learners into reading. Bloomfield (1961, p. 57)
calls the mastery of the initial 36 lessons “perhaps the most important part of
his [the child’s] entire formal education.” [4]
The following modifications make Bloomfield and Barnhart’s text
especially useful in an EFL context.
1. On the first line of each of Bloomfield and
Barnhart’s lessons there is a list of phonetically similar words to be studied
and read. Bloomfield (1961, p. 57) calls these words “well-known” and “part of the
spoken vocabulary of almost every preschool child.” Unfortunately, it is not
clear how he came to this conclusion. In the first seven lessons alone there
are words such as “gap,” “sap,” “gag,” “nag,” “sag,” “dam,” “dab,” “jab,” and
“nab,” not widely known by pre-school children or beginning learners of
English. It is recommended that these and other low frequency words be
eliminated from the text for EFL use, as learners may not be able to “tolerate
incomprehensible vocabulary items.” (Ur, 1996, p. 148) Indeed, learners may
stop “to look every one up in a dictionary” and/or “feel discouraged from
trying to comprehend the text as a whole.” (Ur, 1996, p. 148)
2. Bloomfield and Barnhart use nonsense words
in each lesson for their phonemic value. It is recommended that the EFL teacher
omit them, for the reasons given above. (Bloomfield and Barnhart allow that
they are not essential to the lessons.)
3. Dictations can and should be used with
Bloomfield and Barnhart’s lessons; they reinforce the letter-sound correspondences
of English, essential for learners to master according to Bloomfield and
Barnhart’s theory of reading.
Over 100 years ago,
Henry Sweet (1899, p. 35), the leading British philologist of his day, wrote
that “the greatest help in learning a (foreign) alphabet is to establish
definite associations between the symbol and its sound.” His claim has never
been seriously challenged, and Bloomfield and Barnhart’s text, still in print
after 43 years, establishes those definite associations--associations which
happen to be the major obstacle faced by reading students whose L1 is a
non-Romanized language. With the minor modifications suggested above, teachers
can use Bloomfield and Barnhart’s two preparatory steps and first 36 lessons
(at least) to successfully teach reading to these learners.
1.
c and k
both designate the same English phoneme. This may be an obstacle later, when
the student learns to write, but is not a problem now.
2.
q and x should not be used in initial lessons--q
because it occurs in connection with an unusual value of the letter u
(for w), and x because it represents two phonemes (ks or gz).
Bloomfield,
L. & Barnhart, C. L. (1961) Let’s read: A linguistic approach.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Sweet, H.
(1899) The practical study of languages. London: Oxford University
Press.
Ur, P. (1996) A
course in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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